These are some of the questions McGregor will explore in the academic research and novel based on Webber’s life that she will submit for her Doctor of Creative Arts at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS).

McGregor put her interest in Webber on hold while she undertook other writing, including of her novel Indelible Ink – which won the Age Book of the Year in 2011 – and her travel memoir Strange Museums. But she has now returned to the subject that has preoccupied her for so long.

“I have a lot of compassion and a lot of fear and curiosity about her,’’ says McGregor of Webber, a woman who reputedly carried a knuckle-duster in her handbag.

McGregor has scoured archives, police records and other material in search of information about the Bathurst-born Webber, who arrived in Sydney in the 1930s as a young woman. She lived in Surry Hills, then a tough, impoverished suburb and the centre of a criminal underworld dominated by such figures as Tilly Devine and Kate Leigh.

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Webber was a thief, was involved in the sly grog trade and was charged with a range of offences, including murder. She was also an “out” lesbian, whose lovers included a young prostitute.

“She has remained a footnote and very marginalised for various reasons, including her sexuality,’’ says McGregor. “So [this work] is like a rescue mission.”

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Webber is worth “rescuing” in part because of what her story reveals about Sydney at the time, says McGregor. Although Webber was dubbed the most violent woman in Sydney, other women were convicted of far more heinous crimes. Webber, who defeated the murder charges against her, was often jailed on minor charges, most frequently for busking with her accordion.

“She was very defiant and quite openly queer,’’ says McGregor. “Although lesbianism wasn’t illegal like male homosexuality, it was proscribed ... So to have someone who stood up in that environment was really extraordinary.”

Webber’s defiance manifested early on. On remand in rural Hay in 1932, before she arrived in Sydney, the 26-year-old gave her religion in official papers as “nil”.

“Even in the 1960s in Sydney, to say that you didn’t have a religion was a pretty radical thing,’’ says McGregor.

Such clues to character are invaluable for McGregor as she grapples with the life of a woman largely absent from history. There are many gaps in Webber’s story but in fictionalising her tale, McGregor aims to present a plausible account informed by extensive research and a desire for historical accuracy. She notes that “facts” can themselves be slippery, filtered through the prism of authority.

“Fiction doesn’t give me a licence to write anything that is outlandish,’’ says McGregor. “What I’m trying to do is to create a life that sticks to every single fact that exists and to stitch in between. I want to be able to say this could have happened. I want it to have documentary validity, to have historical rigour and to be completely reliable to people as a history, in the same way a good period novel can be.”

While she researched Webber’s era, McGregor was struck by the difficulties women faced at a time when they were largely confined to the home, could not open bank accounts in their own name, when job options were limited and their pay a fraction of the male wage.

The author has also learnt about the changing nature of urban poverty, which hasn’t been eradicated from Sydney but has moved from suburbs like Surry Hills to the city’s fringes.

She welcomes recent television dramas that depict the Sydney crime world of the 1920s and 30s. Although they can be sensationalised and romanticised, they can reveal parts of our history, she says. However, McGregor’s own approach is different. She wants to strip Webber’s story back to its basic elements.

“It will be a raw, brutal reality that is pretty foreign to us.”

This story written and produced by the University of Technology, Sydney, for Brink, a publication distributed monthly in The Sydney Morning Herald.